New fog, who dis?
Guess who got Aura 2 in a Humble Bundle once upon a time and forgot about it until tonight?!
I’ve never played around with it before, but just a bit of poking at buttons got me to something very close to what my original vision was, so I’m pretty happy. I’ll probably fiddle with it a little bit more, but I really need to finalize the ground before I say “Style Set!”
Also, we have a fortune teller!
I’m still not fully set on her outfit (it feels a little plain) which is why I only did a quick idle for tonight. I was able to get the key components of the outfit that I was envisioning, however. I knew from the beginning I wanted her to have braids popping out of her hood, and I wanted her eyes to glow. I added a mask in homage to not the terrible world we live in today, but to the merchants in Resident Evil 4---What’re ya buyin? What’re ya sellin?
I’ve got the eye blinks running independently on a random timer, so she’ll sometimes blink at you a lot, and other times she’ll just…stare.
It’s hard to capture in the gif since I had to reduce the quality to upload it here, but I’m using a fun little hack with animation style mixing. The fortune teller’s idle animation is made by creating alternately configured versions of her mesh in MagicaVoxel--in other words, each frame is a unique mesh. The animation is just a matter of enabling and disabling the meshes in sequences. It’s not at all a time efficient way to animate, but it allows me to basically perfectly recreate pixel animation in voxel form, which is the aesthetic that I tend to stick to in my voxel work. The eye animation however…is linear! The reason for this is because I find selectively injecting smooth animations among stepped animations gives a fun otherworldly effect. The viewer might not immediately pick up on what’s going on, but they’ll get a sense that something is just slightly off, and this too is an aesthetic I like going for.
You might also be sucking air through your teeth at the idea of animating via enabling and disabling meshes, but actually, it’s not as much of a processing overhead as you might think, especially in such a small project as this. Voxel meshes in this style by their nature are extremely low poly, and to get that pixel art look, you end up working with very few frames. I’ve had scenes full of 30+ fully animating characters in this way and haven’t experienced any frame loss at all.
Ooh, what if she had antlers?
Questions for tomorrow. :)